PUBLICATION ETHICS AND PUBLICATION MALPRACTICE STATEMENT
FOR THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS IN BULGARIA (CLIB)

These Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Guidelines govern the regulation of the standards for ethical conduct to which all parties involved in the publication process of the Proceedings of the International Conference Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (CLIB) shall comply. The Proceedings is issued by the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (referred below as the CLIB Proceedings) publishes double-blind peer-reviewed papers that have been accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria (CLIB). CLIB aims at exploring novel approaches and methods in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) especially with a view to their application to small and less-resourced languages such as Bulgarian, and the bridging of the discrepancies between big and small languages with respect to language technologies. The Conference is dedicated to fostering the NLP community and furthering the cooperation between Bulgarian and foreign researchers and teams around the world through sharing high-quality scientific results in all areas of computational linguistics and NLP.

CLIB covers a broad spectrum of areas related to NLP, with a special focus on Bulgarian. It invites contributions on original research, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • semantics, syntax, grammar and the lexicon;
  • cognitive, mathematical and computational models of language processing;
  • lexical semantics and ontologies;
  • linguistic annotation – POS tagging, syntactic and semantic parsing, etc.;
  • word sense disambiguation;
  • MWE recognition;
  • information extraction;
  • text analysis and summarisation;
  • NLP methods and applications;
  • corpus linguistics;
  • multilingual processing and applications, machine translation and translation aids.

Papers accepted to the Conference must include original state-of-the-art work in some of the areas of computational linguistcs and NLP, including research covering theoretical contributions, analysis of the impact of theories on technologies, and/or contributions of technologies to the advancement of theory, where appropriate. In-depth analysis and discussion of errors made in the experiments described and the influence of linguistically-motivated features on the performance of the methods and/or models applied receive additional credit toward the overall evaluation score.

There are two categories of research papers: oral and poster presentations. All accepted papers are included in the CLIB Proceedings.

The CLIB Proceedings endorses and behaves in accordance with the codes of conduct and international standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), available free of charge here.

 

ETHICS GUIDELINES FOR THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE AND THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE

The Programme Committee shall appoint members of the Programme Committee and/or the Organising Committee to specific tasks related to the publication of the CLIB Proceedings, including the task of editing the submitted papers and preparing them for publication.

The members of the Programme Committee and the Organising Committee and the editors responsible for the preparation and publication of the CLIB Proceedings shall be committed to fair and professional principles in every aspect of the process of submission, evaluation, acceptance and publication of the conference papers. They shall make fair and unbiased decisions independent of commercial consideration and should ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process.

The Programme Committee shall evaluate and select manuscripts for publication in the Conference Proceedings and for presentation at the Conference exclusively on the basis of their scientific merit. The selection shall be made in careful consideration of the originality, contribution, scientific and methodological quality, technical soundness and clarity of the presented research. These particularities shall be evaluated through a double-blind reviewing process carried out by anonymous reviewers appointed to the task who are experts in the particular field. The Programme Committee members who participate in the selection process must not be involved in the assessment of the manuscript in any other capacity (i.e. as reviewers).

The Programme Committee shall in no way consider manuscripts which present conflicts of interest arising from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions. Upon the establishment of such conflicts, the manuscript shall be rejected without review.

The Programme Committee and the Organising Committee shall by all means respect the confidentiality of the reviewers and authors involved in the process of anonymous review.

The Programme Committee and / or the editor(s) in charge of preparing and publishing the CLIB Proceedings shall always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

The Programme Committee shall have appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflicts of interest and is in charge of managing the conflicts of interest of the staff, authors, reviewers, editors, etc. The Programme Committee shall respond promptly to complaints and should ensure there is a way for dissatisfied complainants to take complaints further. The Programme Committee takes it upon itself to make every possible effort to resolve any conflict or complaint that may arise in line with the best available practices.

The Programme Committee and the Organising Committee shall be responsible for familiarising in due course all parties in the publication process with these Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Guidelines.

 

ETHICS GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

By submitting a paper to the conference, the authors acknowledge that the research reported has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and complies with all relevant legislation.

Authors shall present their results honestly, without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation. They shall justify the significance of their scientific research while at the same time providing comprehensive detail and citations/references to their sources so that any interested parties be able to reproduce the study analysis. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical conduct and shall therefore be deemed unacceptable.

Authors shall strive to ensure that their work is entirely original, and therefore wherever and whenever the work and/or words of others are used, all instances shall be appropriately acknowledged. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing conduct and shall therefore be deemed unacceptable.

In case of submitting the same manuscript to other conferences, the authors must notify the Programme Committee in due time, so that the Programme Committee is aware of the fact that the manuscript might be withdrawn depending on results from other conferences.

The corresponding author shall strive to ensure that there is full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication. Submission is taken by the Programme Committee to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to the submitted manuscript.

In case significant errors are discovered, authors shall duly notify the Programme Committee so that the publication could be withdrawn and revised accordingly in due time.

Authors shall ensure that the authorship accurately reflects the individuals’ contributions to the work and its reporting.

Authors shall disclose relevant funding sources and any existing or potential conflicts of interest.

Authors take full responsibility for the submitted work(s).

Copyright of the manuscripts remains with the respective authors. The papers and all other material included in the Proceedings are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. International Licence (CC BY 4.0).

 

Creative Commons Licence

By submitting their work for publication, the authors agree with the conditions of the license of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Licence details.

 

ETHICS GUIDELINES FOR REVIEWERS

The reviewers are selected from a pool of leading experts in various areas of computational linguistics and NLP. Reviewers are assigned to review manuscripts according to their fields of expertise.

The Programme Committee notifies the reviewers by email about all the relevant information related to the reviewing process and provides access to the Review Form.

The Programme Committee guarantees that peer reviewers’ identities and those of the authors are protected according to the requirements of the double-blind review procedure.

The reviews are crucial for the attestation of the quality of the submitted manuscripts and shall play a primary role in the decision making process as regards the acceptance or rejection of the manuscripts for publication in the Proceedings and presentation at the conference.

Reviewers shall not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions.

Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review shall be kept confidential and shall not be used for personal advantage of the reviewer or anyone else.

Reviews shall be conducted in an objectively, comprehensive, and accurate manner. Any observations, recommendations or critique must be formulated clearly and supported by relevant arguments according to the requirements stated in the Review Form. Reviewers must present their judgment in a respectful, non-offensive way.

In case an appointed reviewer feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript, or is otherwise aware that a prompt or accurate review will be impossible, he or she shall notify the Programme Committee in due time and shall step down from his or her appointment as a reviewer.

COPE ETHICS POLICIES

• Authorship and contributorship
The CLIB Proceedings follow the criteria for authorship and contributorship set up by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for authorship and contributorship.
The contribution of each author, as reflected in the order of the authors’ names, should be determined by the authors themselves.
If there is only one corresponding author, the corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors are named in the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to its publication.
Acknowledgements can be used to identify contributions that do not fulfil the criteria for authorship.

• Handling of complaints and appeals
Any complaints or appeals should be submitted in writing to the Conference email address no later than the deadline for submission of the camera-ready version of the accepted paper.
Complaints and appeals received will be investigated in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and related documents on handling complaints and appeals.

• Handling allegations of research misconduct
Misconduct in research may include falsification of data, fabrication, plagiarism, or unethical treatment of research participants or subjects, or any behaviour that violates established ethical standards and/or compromises the integrity of the research.
All authors are obliged to refrain from such practices in their work.
Suspected research misconduct identified in the work must be clearly described and emphasised by the reviewers as part of the written review.
Appropriate action will be taken in accordance with the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) guidelines on plagiarism (in a submitted / published manuscript), redundant (duplicate) publication (in a submitted / published manuscript), research fraud (in a submitted / published manuscript) and other related documents.

• Conflicts of interest
Conflicts of interest are avoided by ensuring the mutual anonymity of authors and reviewers during the review process.
In addition, the review process allows reviewers to decline to review a paper if they recognise a potential conflict of interest.
Reviewers must not be involved in any way with a submitted paper if they have recently collaborated with the author(s) on the same project, if they have received or may receive financial compensation for the work described in the paper, if they are or have been in any way personally or familially related to the author(s), or if they are close/direct competitors of the author(s). In any of the above cases, the reviewer must decline to review the paper.
To avoid potential conflicts of interest, the conference management system automatically distributes the papers to the reviewers, ensuring a broad match between the keywords provided by the authors and the topics reflecting the reviewers’ research interests and capacities that they themselves have indicated prior to the review. A further restriction is that the author(s) of a paper and the reviewers to whom it is assigned must not belong to the same institution.

• Data sharing and reproducibility
Authors who submit papers to the CLIB Conference are free:

  • to share their research data, code, or other relevant materials in appropriate repositories or archives to ensure the accessibility, transparency and credibility of their research;
  • to provide detailed documentation of shared data to facilitate understanding and replication of the study;
  • to supplement the shared data and documentation with more detailed information on the methods and procedures used in the analyses so as to enable the reproducibility of the results;
  • to follow best practices for data management and documentation, such as the use of standardised formats and metadata.

• Policy on ethical oversight
In all matters requiring ethical oversight, such as falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, the CLIB Proceedings will be guided by the COPE Guidelines on Ethics as described in the Ethics toolkit section and in the detailed Ethics Toolkit Guide.

• Policy on intellectual property
The authors are responsible for the content of the submitted manuscript and all supporting items, data, materials, codes, etc. All responsibility regarding the intellectual property of the work lies with the authors.
In order to meet the conditions of open access publication and to promote the widest possible distribution, the works included in the Proceedings are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. International Licence (CC BY 4.0).
By submitting a paper for publication in the CLIB Proceedings, authors confirm that they accept the terms and conditions of the Licence.
No author or reader fees are charged for access to the Proceedings.

• Policy on retractions and corrections
During the review process, reviewers exercise ethical oversight with respect to possible reasons that could lead to the retraction of an accepted paper (e.g. discovery of plagiarism, lack of proper attribution, unreliable findings, fabrication or falsification, copyright infringement, etc.). The reviewers are instructed to report all such cases that they discover during the review.
In addition, the reviewers are instructed to look for errors in the submitted papers and to point them out to the authors in the review so that they can correct them.

• Policies for ensuring the integrity of the scholarly literature
The guidelines for ensuring the integrity of the scientific literature adopted by the CLIB Proceedings are based on the COPE Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.
The strategies and procedures for dealing with plagiarism, the manipulation of citations and the falsification of data are based, among other things, on the COPE Core Practices Guide and the relevant publications made available in this section of the COPE website.